Asylum seekers arriving in Europe are often seen as part of an undifferentiated mass, and the complex stories of how they arrived are often submerged in the effort to control or manage migration. However, many of them are driven to…
At the beginning of August 2015, 37 Iraqi refugee families left my neighbourhood in East Amman, Jordan, in order to travel to Europe. After years of waiting for resettlement through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) they decided…
The current migration from Africa to Europe is a symptom of deeply rooted problems that exist on the continent. While there is some truth to the narrative that some progress has been made and that the economies of some of…
Over the past decade, a range of dialogue initiatives and policy frameworks has been launched with ‘third countries’, that is, non-European Union (EU) countries, loosely gathered under the rubric of the EU’s Global Approach to Mobility.[1] They include the creation…
Most asylum seekers arriving in the European Union (EU) in 2015 have come by irregular means via land or sea, transiting several other countries along the way. In at least some of these transit countries they might have had the…
European Union (EU) readmission agreements allow for the readmission by states into their territory of both their own nationals and nationals of other countries – ‘aliens’ – in transit who have been found in an illegal situation in the territory…
As far back as 1994 when I was inducted as an Ensign of the Hellenic Coast Guard, we were dealing with both refugees and economic migrants on Lesbos Island, which lies only ten nautical miles from the Turkish coast. At…
In November 2014, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière floated the idea of establishing ‘welcome and departure centres’ in major transit countries in North Africa, where applications for asylum would be processed. By removing the obligation to be on European…
There were three shelters for refugees who were just passing through Belgrade, the Serbian capital, in 2014, and five asylum centres for those who wished to apply for asylum. However, the capacities were insufficient, as more than 2,500 people were…
Until the partial opening of the borders through the Balkans in summer 2015, Patras – Greece’s third city and harbour – used to be the main transit port for irregular migrants heading to Italy and the rest of Europe. In…